


Uncrafted

by SleepsWithCoyotes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dragons, First Lines Challenge, M/M, Pre-Slash, Shapeshifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 02:33:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8127005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepsWithCoyotes/pseuds/SleepsWithCoyotes
Summary: Tony's always suspected the gods actively despise him, but now he has proof.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Doing a Bucky/Tony "first line" challenge on [tumblr](http://ciceqi.tumblr.com/). Asukaskerian asked for: Nobody had told him about the motherfucking *dragon.* (Because I am physically incapable of writing MCU in anything but present tense, I dropped a word from the original prompt.)

Nobody told him about the motherfucking _dragon._ Admittedly, their information about the catacombs beneath the Hydra stronghold is sketchy at best, but it seems to Tony like a dragon would be hard to miss. Hard to move in as well; the chamber he nearly stumbled out into is cavernously large, but the only tunnels he sees branching off are all man-sized.

The wall his back is plastered to is achingly cold, the packed dirt hard as iron. It'd set his teeth to chattering if he weren't already chilled through, but the thin homespun Hydra left him in after his first trip to the interrogation chamber is less than useless. He knows he's in trouble; his hand is all but frozen on the handle of his stolen lantern, so at least he still has light, but he stopped shivering a dozen branchings of the tunnel back, had been stumbling along in a daze until he nearly waltzed right out into a dragon's lair.

And then there's the dragon. He's always suspected the gods actively despise him, but now he has proof.

What he can see of the dragon by the focused beam of his copper-sided lamp is impressive. It gleams pale as ice in the wavering light, a massive heap of muscle and claws and impenetrable hide. It's curled up in a tight ball, resting its terrifying jaws on its forearms; it seems to be asleep, which may be Tony's only stroke of luck so far.

To be fair, getting captured by Hydra in the first place had been his idea. It'll even be worth it if he can just make it back alive with the intelligence he's gathered during his stay.

Finding himself leaning a little too heavily on the tunnel wall, Tony forces himself to stand up straight. Cupping his free hand to his mouth, he breathes into the funnel of his curled fingers, but the sting of the cold rushing back afterwards isn't worth the momentary burst of heat. The map he's been trying to build in his head is still clear in his mind, but when he tries to calculate angles and distances, hoping to find a branch-off to which he could backtrack and avoid the dragon entirely, he's left with the unpleasant realization that Hydra probably intended there be no such thing. It's the dragon or nothing.

Tugging the ripped sleeve of his thin shirt down over the heel of his palm, Tony gingerly nudges the sliding copper door on his lantern nearly closed, biting back curses as the hot metal sends needles of pain through his chilled skin. Instead of a long rectangle, the lantern throws a single, slender line of light, just enough to steer by. Hopefully it's dim enough the dragon won't notice. If he sticks to the walls--

Something glitters on the ground dead ahead, practically at the dragon's feet. It looks like metal, and Tony's painfully aware of just how short of that he is. Need crawls along his bones, made all the worse for his weeks of captivity, stiff hands itching to take and mold and _create_.

It's the privation talking, or else the cold. The dragon is _right there_ , and if that's metal, it's probably armor: the remains of the dragon's last kill, like as not. But if he can get to it, he'll have...something. A weapon at least; a fighting chance, if the gods are looking the other way.

Forcing his leaden feet to move, Tony picks his way across the cavern, trying to walk as light-footedly as he can.

It seems to take an age, and as he draws nearer, he realizes the battered breastplate he first noticed is only one of many. The ground is littered with armor--buckles, straps, plates; it's got to be a trap--and weapons by the score. Not all of them appear marked by battle; many seem to have been carelessly discarded by their previous owners, left to fall where they may. He'll be the first to admit he doesn't know much about dragons--magical creatures interest him about as much as most magic--but it seems an odd thing for a dragon to hoard if that's what this is.

He's right in the midst of the clutter field, easily in range of the dragon's jaws, when he glances over and sees the dim glitter of enormous eyes staring back at him through the gloom.

Yelping a curse, Tony staggers back and nearly drops the lantern in his haste to scoop up the nearest sword. He almost fumbles it, his hand closing reluctantly; he can barely feel the leather-wrapped hilt. Despite the insistent need that dragged him headlong into danger, his knack stirs sluggishly in his bones and gives up: he's not an enchanter, can't turn good steel into anything but better steel, and that's not going to help much against a dragon.

The dragon eyes him for a long moment but doesn't lift its head. When it finally does move, it turns its face away with a heavy sigh, angling its head to bare its throat.

Tony stares. It has to be a trick, but he can't figure out why. He's more than close enough; the dragon could have snapped him up already while he was distracted. There's no reason for it to be practically begging him to kill it unless--

He swings the lantern around in a slow arc and spots what he's looking for almost immediately. Another flash of metal, and another: ten bands that loop the dragon's left foreleg, the smooth scales marred by a crazed spiderwebbing of scars around each. "The hell?" Tony mutters, taking a step forward before he catches himself. He may be crazy, but he tries not to make a habit of being _stupid_.

Crouching slowly, he lays the sword down and straightens again, holding his free hand out to show it's empty. "Hey," he says quietly, mindful of how his voice must be carrying. There's sure to be a search party looking for him by now, and he doesn't want to draw any more attention than he has to. He just can't ignore _this_. "So I don't know much about dragons, but I hear some of you can talk. And if you can talk, uh...can you tell me about those things on your arm? Because they look like binding collars, only I've never heard of anyone using ten at once, and okay, you're a dragon, but...look, help me out here. If someone did this to you...if _Hydra_ did this...."

The dragon's staring at him again. Bright blue eyes slide to the discarded sword and back with a look of mute betrayal, and that's...gods. Tony knows dragons are supposed to be smart, but it's never really occurred to him that they might _feel_ as deeply as a man until now. 

"Do they come off?" he blurts out, and that-- _that_ catches the dragon's attention.

It lifts its head at last, and gods, that's a lot of neck, and fuck, its head is huge, but its shocked and hopeful eyes keep Tony's feet nailed to the ground even when a shuddering ripple passes over it and the dragon begins to _shrink_.

The process is quick, one form melting into another so fast Tony almost can't follow the change at all, but when the dragon finishes its transformation, there's a naked man crouched on the floor in its place. He's probably tall, is impressively muscled, but his dark hair has gone shaggy and unkempt, and his strong, square jaw is obscured under weeks of unshaven scruff.

Blue eyes peer up at him warily through a messy curtain of hair, but the man--the dragon--holds out his left arm wordlessly. Instead of a series of bands, however, the ten collars have transformed along with him into a sleeve of armor that stretches from shoulder to fingertips.

"Shit," Tony mutters, narrowing his eyes. That...is not good. It's also insulting. "Nobody told me Hydra has a crafter of their own."

The dragon doesn't move when Tony approaches. It--he--watches in silence as Tony gingerly bangs on the little door of his lantern to open it up wider and sets it clumsily down. He doesn't flinch when Tony takes his arm and starts turning it this way and that, getting a feel for the magic under his protesting fingers. Gods, he's cold, so cold it's hard to read what his knack is trying to tell him, but there's only one thing that really makes sense.

"So, these collars are linked," he says aloud, not really caring when he doesn't get so much as a nod of confirmation. His usual audience are a trio of golems and a daimon of intellect housed in his forge. Only the latter tends to offer opinions on his rambling. "The crafter who forged them designed them to change shape with you, but someone laid a different enchantment on each piece.

"I'm a crafter myself," he admits, cradling the dragon's arm in his left hand and rubbing the pad of his right thumb over a sunken line of unfamiliar characters. "My knack's for metal, so technically I could have these off you in a heartbeat. I'm no enchanter, though; I can't read these runes, and I have no idea what they'll do to you if I don't find some way around them."

"I can tell you their names," the dragon says in a low, scratchy rumble.

Tony jerks in surprise but doesn't let go. "Yeah?" he asks encouragingly, meeting the dragon's eyes. He hopes he looks trustworthy, or his next question may just get him killed. "Do you know what they do?"

"They make me obey," the dragon says slowly, "and forget."

Tony breathes out heavily. "That...does not sound pleasant. But wait. If I...invoke them?" The dragon nods. "If I invoke them, then won't I...?"

"Remove the binding after you invoke each one. It should...confuse the spell. Or if not," the dragon says softly, "it will wear off."

"That's got to be the politest threat anyone's ever given me," Tony says, grinning a little as the dragon tenses. "No, really--I'm impressed. I owe you a drink when we get out of here. Which, by the way, I'm hoping will be sooner than later, because Hydra should have noticed I've escaped by now, and I'm freezing my literal balls off here."

The dragon actually looks confused, the asshole, like he hasn't even noticed the temperature.

When he lays his right hand over Tony's nearly unresponsive fingers, the warmth that spreads through him is better than sex.

Almost.

"Okay," Tony says, freeing his hand and gently tapping at the plate that encases the dragon's left shoulder. "Let's start from the top. This one is...?"

The dragon hums a low, seamless growl; there's probably a word in it, but Tony can't make heads or tails of it until the dragon says, "Longing."

"Longing," Tony repeats and feels the magic light up under his fingers, giving him access, control...giving him _everything_. His stomach twists, face scrunching in disgust, and he drives his own magic into the shimmering, unfamiliar alloy and breaks open the catches that hold it in place.

It reforms into a collar in his hand, and he doesn't so much drop it as fling it away, shaking his hand wildly like he just dipped it in a vat of slime. "Gods," he hisses, scrubbing his palm against his pants leg. "Who the hell comes _up_ with this shit?" Despite having a knack of his own, he's hated magic most of his life. Now he can safely say he despises it.

"Hydra," the dragon says with a humorless snort, his stiffly-held arm relaxing into Tony's hold.

"Why am I not surprised?" Tony grumbles, shaking his head. "Look. Dragon. What's your name?"

The dragon's frown is thoughtful, not suspicious. Tony recalls too late that the bindings make him _forget_. "Winter?" the dragon offers at last, uncertain.

"Winter," Tony echoes with a decisive nod. "Right. So I'm going to get this thing off you--what's the next one?"

"Rusted," Winter supplies after naming the enchantment properly in that unfamiliar, rumbling tongue.

"Rusted. So. I'm going to get this thing off you," he swears, cracking the next binding and flinging the collar off into the shadows. "And then we're going to run like hell. I don't suppose you know the way out of these tunnels?"

"Too well," Winter growls between 'seventeen' and 'daybreak'. "They send me out to kill too often."

"Even once is too often," Tony agrees. He tries very hard not to think of the strange way his parents' bodies were found, as if something very large had smashed their carriage and them inside it without ever setting foot on the ground. "And listen. You don't have to--you're free to go wherever after we get out of here--but if you need someplace to stay, or somewhere to wait out the control spell if we end up triggering it after all, the people I'm with have been working for years to bring Hydra down. Decades, if we're talking about the captain. Well, I mean, he's a knight and you're a dragon, so that's going to be awkward, but I think you'll like them anyway. If you've got a bone you want to pick with Hydra, that is."

"Furnace," Winter says instead of replying immediately.

"Gods, I wish," Tony mutters under his breath.

Huffing a faint laugh, Winter reaches out, catches Tony by the shoulder, and reels him in, turning him around so that Tony's back is pressed up against the dragon's broad chest, his frozen ass and the backs of his legs snugged into the cradle of Winter's pelvis and bent thighs. He considers struggling for maybe half a second before blessed heat sinks in through every point of contact.

"Oh, fuck," Tony groans, wiggling back a little to soak up more of the dragon's warmth. "Marry me and call me princess."

A steamy puff of breath tickles Tony's nape at Winter's quiet chuckle, the dragon dipping his head briefly to rest his brow against the back of Tony's head. The dragon's cock is an unavoidable presence between them, but it doesn't stir at all despite Tony's restless shifting. He's entirely relieved by that, because things are horrifying enough between the collars and the enchantment and the utterly terrifying possibility that he might have a temporary slave at the end of this. Adding one more element of coercion might just give him nightmares for eternity.

But later, maybe, if Winter sticks around and has any interest at all in humans...well, maybe.

" _Tell_ me you have clothes somewhere," Tony all but begs as Winter lets him up at last, freed of the bindings and staring in awe at his own arm like he hasn't seen it in seventy years.

"Yes," Winter says absently, then shakes himself and gets up to go find them, moving sure-footed despite the dark.

When he steps back into the narrow beam of Tony's lantern, he's dressed nearly from head to toe in black leather stretched impressively across his broad frame, only his scarred left arm left bare.

It's official. The gods fucking hate him.

On the other hand, at least he'll have a nice view on his way to hell.


End file.
